h264 in AVI for Windows Movie Maker

[SimonSez07]

Hi,

I have a bunch of MOV files from my digital camera. They are good quality (640x480 30fps) and the video is in h264 but the audio is in some SOWT format.

Sample Here (http://www.sturmer.org/download/1500/MVI_0275.MOV)

I need to get this into a format that Windows Movie Maker can understand, preferably with no video re-encoding or minimal quality loss.

I used ffmpeg.exe to decode the audio and save in AVI like this:


ffmpeg.exe -i input.mov -f avi -vcodec copy -acodec pcm_s16le -ac 2 output.avi


Windows Movie Maker (and Windows Media Player) will accept this file, but the Video is black. I have FFDShow installed and I think that may be the problem. It doesn't properly decode this file.

I tried changing the FourCC from avc1 to H264, but same result.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Simon

[audyovydeo]

Hi,

I have a bunch of MOV files from my digital camera. They are good quality (640x480 30fps) and the video is in h264 but the audio is in some SOWT format.

Sample Here (http://www.sturmer.org/download/1500/MVI_0275.MOV)

I need to get this into a format that Windows Movie Maker can understand, preferably with no video re-encoding or minimal quality loss.

I used ffmpeg.exe to decode the audio and save in AVI like this:


ffmpeg.exe -i input.mov -f avi -vcodec copy -acodec pcm_s16le -ac 2 output.avi


Windows Movie Maker (and Windows Media Player) will accept this file, but the Video is black. I have FFDShow installed and I think that may be the problem. It doesn't properly decode this file.

I tried changing the FourCC from avc1 to H264, but same result.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Simon


Well with QuickTime (Pro) you can export it to an uncompressed AVI, of whatever format Windows Movie Maker requires to read.

Otherwise, just rename the file to .mp4, and extract the raw streams (H264 and AC3) with mp4box / yamb, and continue from there.

cheers
a/v

[audyovydeo]

funny, I just tried it on your sample, mp4box reports the audio as AC3 :

C:\temp\avchd>mp4box -raw 2 MVI_0275.mp4
Extracting AC3 Audio


but then no application recognises it as such (QuickTime, VLC, Mediainfo, mp4box itself !)
does your camera say what the audio track is ?

cheers
a/v

[SimonSez07]

QuickTime shows it as 16-bit integer (Little Endian) but other programs show it as "Apple QuickTime SWOT Little Endian PCM Audio (sowt) Codec".

I can get the audio codec into any format I want, and that is not the problem. The problem is that I can't get the AVC video into an AVI container that plays in WMP / WMM.

I wish to avoid exporting it to uncompressed AVI as that will increase the file-size by a factor of 10 or more, and thus complicate things.

[Chikuzen]

ffmpeg.exe -i input.mov -vcodec ffv1 -acodec pcm_s16le output.avi

ffv1 is lossless codec, and it can be decoded with ffdshow.
Sample here (http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?u1tgqj2tgih)

[SimonSez07]

Thanks Chikuzen. That increases the file-size, but it is better than uncompressed AVI by a factor of 3.

I am deciding between that or taking the quality loss of mgpeg for the sake of file size:

ffmpeg.exe -i input.mov -vcodec mjpeg -qscale 4 -acodec pcm_s16le output.avi

[audyovydeo]

I am deciding between that or taking the quality loss of mgpeg for the sake of file size


You are already implicitly accepting the quality loss you'll have by converting H.264 into whatever you will choose to encode with WMovieMaker....

cheers
a/v

[Blue_MiSfit]

Umm... if you're advanced enough to be using CLI tools and clearly understanding a few things about video, why are you using Windows Movie Maker??

There are some awesome open source NLE apps out there which are hugely more powerful!